Wednesday, November 16

Flashes of clarity:

It’s probably time to treat the network we have as a failure mode.

A pathological network may be an existential threat to the project of
democratic governance.

Whatever anarchic inclinations I’ve had over the years: I have a hard time
imagining that any preferable alternative emerges from the large-scale failure
of a democratic state. At least not this one, however imperfectly democratic
it has been in fact.

❃

Ok, let me think for a minute.

Much of the American political system has been captured by a combination of
populist authoritarian racists1 and a dangerously
deteriorated Republican Party. That’s one thing that’s happening. It would be
a bad idea to downplay it.

Beyond that, but also all wrapped up in it: It feels like there’s this
intensifying of in-group / out-group dynamics like I don’t think I’ve seen in
my lifetime.

Of course that’s an old process. American ideological polarization has roots
centuries older than this election cycle. In a nation-state founded in the
context of slavery, genocidal colonization, cycles of mass migration and social
upheaval, and grand-scale ideological/religious ferment — how could it
not?

But above and beyond the American historical background radiation:

From outside it but not outside its reach, the dominant right-wing discourse
appears as a cesspit of disinformation and resentment. It abhors moderation or
nuance. The guffawing idiocy of talk radio and shit-tier web forums has
consumed institutions for which those things were once just useful instruments
of propaganda. It’s become a determining norm. Even conservative cultural
outlets and individual voices that buck this trend seem complicit with its aims
or incapable of exerting any moderating influence.

Left-wing discourse (even though smart people in it will explicitly and
thoughtfully reject this assessment) seems locked in a cycle of conflict
between factions and individuals whose goals and values are often
indistinguishable to outsiders. The parsing of text for adherence to a
constantly shifting and sometimes arbitrary standard of correctness consumes
vast resources, alienates potential allies from one another, and poisons
efforts at basic empathy. It’s almost impossible to address this pattern
within the norms of left-wing discourse, because it will be parsed as a
regressive defense of incorrect postures or identity relationships which in
turn reduces to a right-wing argument about “political correctness”. (Without
those norms, it tends to reduce itself to that sort of thing.)

Some of the left-wing / social-justice internet has simply crawled up its own
asshole into absurdist theatrics. Considerably worse, some of it feels like
it’s curdled into a culture of weirdly exaggerated mob discipline, dogpiling,
and absolutist territorial infighting. This pattern seeps into the language
and behavior even of lots of intellectually rigorous people who try hard to
communicate in good faith. (And also probably the behavior of me.)

It’s early in a bad time, but most of these things feel unlikely to improve
under the constraints we now face. Or to stop feeding one another.

❃

The network now defines, if it doesn’t yet thoroughly own, the space we occupy
in reality. Too much of the network space encourages adversarial communication
as the only means of participation. Just existing without engaging some
conflict narrative is possible within a lot of physical rooms. It’s a lot
harder on a lot of the internet. This alone is almost a deterministic
guarantee of fighty bullshit.

❁

Two bumper stickers on a car in the Post Office parking lot the other morning:

It’s not enough to remember Nazis as symbols of evil. What happened to six
million people was not done by metaphors for wickedness, it was done by other
people with hands and brains like ours. They were infected with the idea that
there are intrinsically good people and intrinsically evil people. They were
extremely evil, but not intrinsically. They were wrong in ways that you and I
can be wrong. This is the most terrifying thing I know, and I know it from
Grandma. What do “it can happen here” and “never again” mean? I can’t know the
way that Grandpa did or Grandma did.

…

From there, it’s obvious that she did not let go, was not subsumed into the
history textbook subheds of the century; she was always moving under her own
power, in catastrophies and in merely imperfect systems. And so was everyone.
Grandma was special in many ways, but point to anyone and so are they. Some of
us are lucky enough to get to a place where our work can accrete, where we can
build a piece of the world we want. Many of us are not. War is only one of the
forces that can destroy a person’s chances, or a generation’s work, or a
generation. The weight of history is intolerable, an ocean-trench pressure, if
we try to take it as a weight. Talking with Grandma helped me take it as a
liquid, something that we can equalize against without being crushed, something
whose unintelligible mass we can, with luck, push through and move within.

I’ll leave it on that one. It’s more useful than any thoughts I’m having.

✧

1 Only _some_ members of this movement are
self-declared Nazis, in the Klan, or activist antisemites, so I guess we're
still collectively on the fence about whether "pack of fascists" would be
appropriate terminology.